Budel

On Wednesday the Public Prosecutor demanded prison sentences up to nine years against the nine men suspected of involvement in a failed attempt to hijack a helicopter and break gang leader Benaouf A. out of the prison in Roermond. Some of the suspects are also facing charges of weapons possession and possession of stolen cars, NU.nl reports.

Former psychiatric prison patient John van T. managed to slip away during his trial in Den Bosch on Monday morning. The 48-year-old man escaped from the courtroom just before the Public Prosecutor demanded that he again be sentenced to institutionalized psychiatric care. He is suspected of holding a couple hostage in a home in Budel on April 5th last year, and trying to extort them, NOS reports.

The Koninklijke Marechaussee is calling for more supervision and security at small airports in the Netherlands, Trouw reports. The lack of supervision at the 11 smaller airports in the country makes them vulnerable to drug- and human trafficking, according to the newspaper.

The Koninklijke Marechaussee is a policing force that works as part of the Dutch military and is responsible for airport security.

Early this year the police re-screened all 58 thousand asylum seekers who arrived in the Netherlands in 2015. All names were again checked for possible "hits" in the police's terrorism database and no extra information emerged, according to a letter from the Ministry of Security and Justice

With New Year's eve approaching, the police are once again discovering large amounts of illegal fireworks all across the Netherlands. In the past month alone, the police have confiscated 3,403 kilograms of illegal fireworks and arrested numerous suspects.

Snowfall will cover a large portion of the Netherlands Sunday night, meteorologists at the KNMI say. All provinces are under a code yellow weather alert for snow and slippery conditions, except Noord and Zuid Holland, and Zeeland.

The asylum seekers' center in Budel, Brabant, is filling up fast. The Nassau Dietzkazerne barracks has a maximum capacity of 1200 people. At the moment, more than 1100 refugees live there, meaning the center administrators have to look for a new location to accommodate the overflow.